"The truth is, there is no “proper” subject for poetry. All of life is its subject. Nothing should be out of bounds." Max Wallis • Guardian

"This is an extraordinarily rich book from a young poet who is already able to make phrases dance and vibrate. He is skilled with prose poems, open form and the placement of short lines. And that technical range is allied with a hugely fertile imagination to create a book which is often unputdownable." Ian Pople • Manchester Review

"You don't need to know what Modernism did to poetry to feel how the project of twenty-first-century life means following through on the great social changes of the twentieth century—you just need to check Facebook and see how many times we need to be liked to get up in the morning." Katie Peterson • Poetry Daily

"One of Yeats’s stranger ideas to come from the 1890s and the beginning of his immersion in the rituals and beliefs of the Order of the Golden Dawn was his wish -- influenced by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s symbolist play Axël -- to establish a Castle of Heroes on a lake isle in Lough Key, County Roscommon, a lake that would, a half-century later become a very real part of John McGahern’s world when he moved to live with his father in Cootehall, Co Roscommon after the death of his mother." Frank Shovlin • Irish Times

"There’s something shocking and very rebellious about the simple act in those final lines of consuming things that haven’t been regulated by bureaucracy and vetted by the state. This wild disengagement from politics and finance and the nanny-state occurs in quite a few of Pandemonium’s poems." Simon Haworth • The Manchester Review

"Twombly reads both Seferis and Rilke in translation – the latter in Stephen Mitchell’s rendition of The Duino Elegies – as he reads Horace and Virgil in translation. And there, I’m afraid, is the rub." Marjorie Perloff • TLS

"He was always a good hater and would have been a skilled practitioner of the medieval Scots tradition of poetic flyting – the trading of literary insults – but he was good at friendship too. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was the centre of a circle of poets, writers and critics who met regularly in the pubs and howfs of Edinburgh’s Rose Street. Milne’s Bar was a favourite venue and the smoke-filled corner where they regularly gathered became known as Little Kremlin. The group was more than a tight literary milieu, a Bloomsbury of the north, with whisky and incidental bagpipe music; it was the core of what would become known as the modern Scottish renaissance, kindling a cultural confidence that inspired the revived independence movement." Annalena McAfee • Guardian

"He mines the poetry in his library – poetry whose aesthetic, as in the case of Rilke or Seferis, seems far removed from his own syncretic collage composition – for thematic material. And in responding to this process, Jacobus inevitably engages in what is traditional source study. She assesses with great acumen what Twombly’s aims were, and shows brilliantly how he combines the various poetic motifs in his painting. But the question remains, to paraphrase Clark, whether the inclusion of handwritten copies of specific poetic passages does anything to the normal art-ness of picture space. Since, for that matter, the poetic material is almost invisible – we have to take the critic’s word for its presence as well as for the further citations with which she often enhances her material – how much does its existence actually affect the space, structure, and scale of a given painting?" Marjorie Perloff • TLS

"Thomas McCarthy’s style does not just apply historical insights and visions to familiar landscapes; his is a style that does not easily declare itself, cautiously feeling its way along the currents it describes, and occasionally editing in details that give away the vulnerability and safety the poems seem to desire in the world: “Like us, the tide is seeking a cove / Where it doesn’t need to be obliging,” begins Become Water, a poem that seems almost utopian in comparison with the book’s other scenes." John McAuliffe • Irish Times

"Long ago I spent some years in the East, and I recall that in a certain establishment in a back street in Singapore a motto used to hang over the bar: ‘As a martini demands gin, so British verse requires Tom Raworth.’" John Tranter • Jacket "Raworth is very much in favour of jam (as reward, as improv) today: if there is one element that is at stake in all his work, it is that of speed. His is a quicksilver mind, one that announces very early, ‘i made this pact, intelligence/shall not replace intuition’ (‘Wedding Day’), and that revels in brushing aside any tendency to ponder." Jonathan Catherall • The Literateur "In the later poems, the most daily of routines are seen to have a political unconscious. The occasion for ‘Lippitude’ (the noun literally means soreness of the eyes, but it also implies having a lot of lip), is probably the familiar eye-chart test." Marjorie Perloff • PN Review

"I began writing at 17 in what was chronologically my second language, having arrived in England at the age of eight as a Hungarian refugee with no English. I cannot tell precisely what inner resources I brought with me at that age, but I was not a clean slate. That slate had already been written on by my family history, my parents, my city, my street and the events of my then short life. I was, like everyone else, a palimpsest." George Szirtes • Guardian

"Weirdly I think that one of the reasons why I like Dear Boy so much (and the selections of Berry’s work in this collection, which we can get on to) is that I find her poems so difficult and confusing. Not difficult and confusing in the way I find a lot of poetry though, where I might just read it once and forget about it, or move on to the next poem like huh (which I probably do too often), instead there are some poems in that book, and in this selection, that I feel like I’m now a bit obsessed with." Lucy Burns and Callum Coles • The Manchester Review

"Nothing is natural in the work of Rae Armantrout. Our words, gestures, and relationships are conventional, scripted, deformed — or outright produced — by, as she has it, “the interventions of capitalism into consciousness.” On the subject of “nature,” I notice plenty of leaves, and leaf-shadows, and leaf-reflections (in both senses of the word) in her poems — but her plants are urban, compromised, possibly parodying of Keats." Vidyan Ravinthiran • Poetry

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